Condition Elementalist issues in general

[Shaman.2034]

It's clear that people don't like pistol now, but I think it's a symptom of a broader topic: condition elementalist builds feel miserable to play and deserve some serious changes before condi-based weapons can be truly made to feel impactful.

1. Condi utility skills are far too powerful. Signet of Fire, traited Signet of Earth, Glyph of Elemental Power, Lesser and elite Glyphs of Elementals, Primordial Stance, these do way too much condition damage and need serious nerfs or even changes in functionality to make them more utility-focused and less of a DPS increase.

2. Condi weapons are weak, because the utilities are too powerful. Nerf the utilities to open up buffing the weapons.

3. Condi sets don't have any good spammables for trash/short encounters. Power builds enjoy plenty of low cooldown skills and autoattacks that do lots of damage. Condi builds need strong autos and low cooldown skills too. Condi already has the inherent disadvantage that you have to wait a long time for the payoff, so you shouldn't have to rotate through attunements every time you want to kill a random trash mob. Reward complexity with more DPS of course, but raise the baseline to match power builds.

4. Air Attunement seriously needs a lot of damaging conditions added. Give it Confusion or Torment, or if elementalist doesn't deserve to have a variety of conditions for coverage, give it Burning. A lot of Burning, similar to Fire Attunement. Air skills on every condi set feel like dead weight. Power sets benefit nicely from all four attunements these days, with some strong damage skills to cast while passing through the attunement for its utility; it would be nice to bring condi up to that same variety.

5. For Tempest specifically, it would help condi with AoE if all Overloads were increased to 300 radius. It's worth the high risk put in to committing to channeling them. It doesn't directly increase the DPS of the Overloads, just makes them easier to land on groups and moving targets, and allows the elementalist some breathing room while channeling. This benefits all Tempest builds of course, but would especially benefit condi, since elementalist's larger AoE skills are biased toward strike damage.

If these are addressed, there would be plenty of space to make pistol feel good to use without having to heavily rework or redesign it.

[HallMonitor.6392]

I like the idea of 1 and 2. But I also don't like the idea of flat out nerfing them and instead buffing other utilities so they are better once in a while. The problem is we basically only have one utility worth bringing in pve that isn't "damage" in lightning flash while a lot of other classes often have strong utility which ALSO buffs damage.

[Shaman.2034]

16 minutes ago, HallMonitor.6392 said:

I like the idea of 1 and 2. But I also don't like the idea of flat out nerfing them and instead buffing other utilities so they are better once in a while. The problem is we basically only have one utility worth bringing in pve that isn't "damage" in lightning flash while a lot of other classes often have strong utility which ALSO buffs damage.

I agree. Arcane Shield is also pretty good to have on hand, but all of elementalist's utility skills that aren't meant for DPS need drastic cooldown reductions in PvE to make them feel worth the slot (and Lightning Flash deserves to be a 1200 range stunbreak). I think Glyph of Storms would feel good as elementalist's best condi damage utility skill, where the choice between Fire and Earth for damage or utility adds interesting depth to the skill instead of "cast this thing on cooldown because it does a lot of damage." It's also a large ground-targeted pulsing AoE, one of the best forms of damaging utility skills in my opinion that always feel good to use regardless of the specific build.

Edited March 2 by Shaman.2034

[Emberheart.8426]

5 hours ago, HallMonitor.6392 said:

I like the idea of 1 and 2. But I also don't like the idea of flat out nerfing them and instead buffing other utilities so they are better once in a while. The problem is we basically only have one utility worth bringing in pve that isn't "damage" in lightning flash while a lot of other classes often have strong utility which ALSO buffs damage.

You kinda need a bit of both nerfs for condi utilities and buffs/reworks for others. If you buff other utility skills that is great because ele can finally get utility in its kit that is equivalent to other professions. However, if you keep condi utility damage to overtuned levels then the opportunity cost to use other utilities will be higher than other professions, which would still lose less damage by swapping them out. 

[Noodle Ant.1605]

while these points are valid, i feel like this puts too much blame on utility skills

its not rare for many dps builds to feature powerful utility/elite skills that never leave the skillbar. its not fair to strip condi ele all 4/4 of them and pretend every other build still do great with 0 dps utility/elite skills. even then, eles condi weapons skills arent actually all that weak and have similar numbers to other classes. some offhand skills can actually be considered overpowered (but require enemies to sit in strange-shaped aoes, which is an actual issue)

pistol suffers from being a bleed-based, long duration/low stack count condi weapon. it has to shoot the enemy a lot of times with non-autos before the dmg starts to roll in, which makes it painful for trash mob usage. this is on top of having to manage the bullet mechanic, which obviously isnt for all players

pistols predecessors, dagger and scepter, at least could stack up some decent burn stacks in a short time and were also straightforward to play (with the exception of dagger dashes)

[Tinker.6924]

18 hours ago, Shaman.2034 said:

Condi weapons are weak, because the utilities are too powerful. Nerf the utilities to open up buffing the weapons.

No.  Just no. This will quickly become "be careful what you ask for, you might just get it" and the end result will not be good at all. If weapons are weak, buff them.  If this results in ele specs overperforming, I'm sure anet will nerf something eventually but it's also possible they will leave things as is.  I would rather that overperforming become the ele status quo.  Maybe it's the ele turn to be that way. 

Edited March 3 by Tinker.6924

[Bladestrom.6425]

Agree with most points OP, but signets are not powerful they are weak.  for e.g Signet of fire gives 9k crit for a condy build, and 500 damage per second which will be removed in a couple seconds. 

[tiagotatico.6304]

14 hours ago, Tinker.6924 said:

No.  Just no. This will quickly become "be careful what you ask for, you might just get it" and the end result will not be good at all. If weapons are weak, buff them.  If this results in ele specs overperforming, I'm sure anet will nerf something eventually but it's also possible they will leave things as is.  I would rather that overperforming become the ele status quo.  Maybe it's the ele turn to be that way. 

what he is asking is very simple, lets say a condi ele build does 42k damage, buff the weapon and nerf utility so it still does 42k damage, but now you dont pay a heavy price when you want to swap utility, this would make cele perform much better in some roles like pylon kiter, right now the damage loss is too big, around 3k for each ultility

[Tinker.6924]

33 minutes ago, tiagotatico.6304 said:

lets say a condi ele build does 42k damage, Anet "buffs" the weapon in a worthless way and brutally nerfs all utilities and wrecks that build making it do 10k less and many others builds are hurt too

Ftfy.  

That is the far more likely outcome when players ask for buffs and nerfs. You can't control what the dev team will actually do and they will do what they think is right and  that rarely matches what the players think.  

Ask for buffs and you might get changes that are actually improvements and you might not.

Never, ever, ask for nerfs 

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I'm going to disagree with point #2.  Ele, much like guardian, doesn't have "condi weapons."  They're all hybrid.  Condi ele does a large amount of strike damage when compared to other condi builds, and with a big emphasis on burning lets it cleave down trash mobs quite quickly.  I haven't been keeping up with the all the modern builds, but the cooldowns on the old scepter/focus condi weaver are so low that the spec feels unrelenting to play.  There's always more buttons that need to be pressed faster.  

[tiagotatico.6304]

On 3/4/2024 at 2:17 AM, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

I'm going to disagree with point #2.  Ele, much like guardian, doesn't have "condi weapons."  They're all hybrid.  Condi ele does a large amount of strike damage when compared to other condi builds, and with a big emphasis on burning lets it cleave down trash mobs quite quickly.  I haven't been keeping up with the all the modern builds, but the cooldowns on the old scepter/focus condi weaver are so low that the spec feels unrelenting to play.  There's always more buttons that need to be pressed faster.  

that used to be true but not anymore, scepter on condi builds had a 15% strike damage on cweaver, for pistol its 8% strike damage, some weapons are condi because if they were power they would suck, for example dagger, scepter, pistol, staff

[Noodle Ant.1605]

7 hours ago, tiagotatico.6304 said:

some weapons are condi because if they were power they would suck, for example dagger, scepter, pistol, staff

a large part of this is because SotO let all ele especs use sword/warhorn

power dagger and scepter are individually weaker than staff, but had warhorn to compensate on tempest. the issue was that there was hardly any attention given to power tempest for long time, meaning most of these weapons were left to rot

power dagger and scepter didnt work on weaver because dual attunements. staff got buffs that made it somewhat competitive with sword/dagger for a short time (but people were too absorbed with condi staff because ele condi in general benched higher than power at the time) but then weaver got slammed when it got access to warhorn. staff was not compensated

power hammer without catalyst spheres was really only around the same level as power dagger/scepter/staff. however, catalyst was reliant on sphere damage, so staff was out due to its low hit-rate. power dagger was an actual thing on catalyst and people managed to use scepter to some success. then spheres got slammed and hammer buffed while dagger/scepter were forgotten

pistol sets a false precedent that should only be applied to future weapons and is not an excuse to cover up the fact that they forgot to keep these weapons up to date

[TheQuickFox.3826]

I'm still running this. Easy roation, lots of burning. Lots of fun playing it.